Creating A Shortcut in Gmail to View Unread Messages

Background

I've been using Gmail for a number of years; there are many features that I like but one annoying aspect of Gmail is not having a quick view to see all of your unread messages. I have always manually looked through my inbox to see all the unread messages.  If you receive a lot of messages and/or have (unread) messages spanning multiple pages, this task can be time consuming and tedious.  There's a much easier way to view all of your unread messages following the steps detailed.

Enable Quick Links

We'll need to setup the quick links feature available through Google Labs.  Quick links as described by the author provides the ability to gain 1-click access to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail.  The feature can be used for saving common searches, filtering individual messages and more.  Follow these steps to enable quick links:

1. Log in to your Gmail account
2. Click on the Settings tab in the top right hand corner
3. Click on Labs tab
4. Scroll down the page and find Quick Links option
5. Click the Enable radio button
6. Click Save Settings

The quick links box should be available on the left hand side.

View Unread Messages

To view all your unread messages, enter the following:

1. In the search box at the top of the page, enter label: unread
2. Click the Search Mail button

This filters all your messages to show only Unread mail.

Create A Shortcut to View Unread Mail

Since we don't want to perform a search each time to view our unread mail, we'll use the Quick Links feature to create a link to the unread messages search. Skip the first two steps if the last thing executed was filtering/searching for unread mail (step 2 above).

1. In the search box at the top of the page, enter label:unread
2. Click the Search Mail button
3. Click the Add Quick Link option in the Quick Links section on the left hand side
4. Enter Unread Mail as the title for this link

That's it. You now have the ability to view all your unread messages with 1-click.